Every day I experience life in the world of healthcare IT, supporting 3000 doctors, 18000 faculty, and 3 million patients. In this blog I record my experiences with infrastructure, applications, policies, management, and governance as well as muse on such topics such as reducing our carbon footprint, standardizing data in healthcare, and living life to its fullest.

Monday, September 29, 2008

The Wall Street Crisis

During the decade I've been CIO, IT operating budgets have been 2% of my organization's total budget, which is typical for the healthcare industry.

During the same period, IT budgets for the financial services industry have averaged 10% or higher.

Since 1998, I've often been told that Healthcare IT needs to take a lesson from the financial folks about doing IT right.

Today's Boston Globe nicely summarizes the financial issues at the core of the crisis

Given the recent challenges of Lehman, Merrill, AIG, Washington Mutual, and others, you wonder just how effective the IT systems of these companies have been.

Of course they had great transactional systems, disaster recovery, infrastructure, and data warehouses.

However, did they have the business intelligence tools and dashboards that could alerted decision makers about the looming collapse of the industry?

Did the financial services industry have controls, risk analysis, or a memory of previous crisis - the Depression, the Japanese banking crisis, Enron/Worldcom? Was it greed, irrational expectations or too much data and not enough information that brought down these great institutions?

I'm sure many books will be written about the causes and those who are to blame.

One thing is for certain, In 2008, no one is going to tell me that healthcare IT should run as well as Lehman Brothers. I've even talked to folks in the industry who are rewriting their websites and resumes to remove historical references to their overwhelming historical successes in financial services IT.

I certainly feel for everyone in the financial services industry - the anxiety and stress must feel overwhelming. Given that every person in the US will be paying $3000 in tax dollars to rescue the industry if the bailout bill passes today, we're all going to accept responsibility for the IT systems and the management using them that led the unsinkable ship of the financial services industry into an iceberg at full speed.

Hospitals are going to EMRs with extreme speed. Some are doing little research nor are they changing business processes. All of which lead to disaster. I believe EMR's are more complicated than any financial system.

Good comments. I agree that IT is combination of governance, technology, and good management. In the case of the financial services industry, it's probably the governance and management that were to blame.